Friday, June 07, 2013

Beware of Crete's Barren Glyphs, Dept.

Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth

Just
finished this a few days ago, and it was quite excellent. A history of
the effort to translate the tablets written in Linear B that were found
on Crete as part of Arthur Evans' 1900 excavation at Knossos and
subsequently on the Greek mainland. The book focuses on the three
principal players in the translation effort: Evans; Michael Ventris, the
British architect and language prodigy who eventually cracked the code;
and Alice Kober, the American classicist and college professor whose
meticulous efforts laid the groundwork for Ventris' eventual success.

As
much as a fascinating history of this intellectual crusade, the book is
an effort to claim for Kober the credit she'd been denied in her time
and since. She died young, before Ventris finished, and her own
reticence and painstaking diligence prevented her from making the sorts
of claims that would've drawn attention to her efforts and successes.
And, of course, she was a woman academic at a more-benighted time in
American history.

Two thumbs up. The author is a New York Times
journalist--she works in The Grey Lady's obituary department--who
trained as a linguist, so she is doubly qualified to write about both
overlooked lives and those spent in the pursuit of the key to a
language.

the sobsister on Tumblr

About Me

Contact The Sobsister

Messages not involving the pitiful state of my Johnson or ways in which gray-market meds could actually improve the lackluster performance/size/luster/value of my Johnson can be addressed to: thesobsister[at]yahoo[dot]com.